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Japan can call itself the world champion of baseball. The Japanese team captured the inaugural World Baseball Classic by beating Cuba 10-6 in the championship game San Diego.

Tapes 'n Tapes' simple pop music treads the line between stupid and clever in a way that's oddly intelligent, not to mention enormously entertaining. The band often mines familiar territory — Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, Pixies — but it infuses those sounds with its own weird sense of mystery and mischief.

The New Standards are making waves by reinterpreting their favorite songs in a jazz mode. John Munson of Semisonic fame plays bass and sings, Chan Poling of the Suburbs plays piano, and Steve Roehm is on vibraphone as they remake songs by the Replacements and the Clash.

The opposition leader in Belarus is calling on supporters to stand their ground. The backers of Alexander Milinkevich are camped out in freezing weather to protest results of an election largely seen as a farce by international observers.

More than a million students and union members march to fight a law easing hiring and firing of workers. The goverment says it will help cut youth unemployment. Opponents say it erodes job security and other benefits.

Two differing accounts have raised questions about an attack on a house in Balad, Iraq, last Wednesday. An Iraqi police report says U.S. forces executed 11 family members. The U.S. military says that is highly unlikely. Matthew Schofield, of Knight Ridder's European Bureau, talks with Melissa Block about the report.

"Happy as a clam" is a shortened form of an old idiom, "happy as a clam at high tide." Just as you might suspect, early Americans decided that clams are happiest when they're undisturbed. It's one of many idioms that have left behind their full phrasing.

Microsoft won't offer the consumer release of its new Windows operating system until January 2007. That's bad news for personal computer makers, retailers and computers, because it means the Windows packages won't be available for the 2006 holiday sale season.

Sidney Bechet played soprano saxophone in the early decades of jazz, before John Coltrane popularized the instrument. A new anthology, Mosaic Select: Sidney Bechet, offers listeners a chance to hear Bechet's music, transferred and restored from rare recordings from 1923 to 1947.

A small, interracial group plans to meet Monday on the steps of the town courthouse. They'll read a resolution condemning the May 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington. He was accused of killing a local farmer's wife.